


Stargazing Dates

by localspacelesbian



Category: Andi Mack (TV)
Genre: Astronomy, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Soft Boys, Stargazing, i love space so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 00:28:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19414690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/localspacelesbian/pseuds/localspacelesbian
Summary: TJ and Cyrus are nerds in love.





	Stargazing Dates

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by this lovely fic

One of TJ and Cyrus’s favorite date-night activities was stargazing. There was just something so peaceful and romantic about looking up at the night sky with the person you love. They would drive a little ways out of town and lay on a blanket, looking at the stars and just talking about anything or enjoying each other’s company in a comfortable silence.

Some nights, Cyrus would keep pointing at different constellations, asking TJ to tell him the stories behind them. Cyrus enjoyed listening to TJ’s stories. To him, it seemed as though TJ knew all the stories behind every single constellation. And the way he told them brought the stories to life and made them feel so real.

Some nights, Cyrus would go on tangents about some astronomical object he had recently learned about, and TJ would just lay there listening to him with a huge smile on his face. To TJ, it seemed as if Cyrus knew everything about the planets and stars and meteors and galaxies and everything else up in the night sky. Sometimes, these tangents got very heated; TJ liked to measure how long those rants lasted. Light pollution was the thing Cyrus ranted about the most often, but the record for ‘longest rant’ went to the one about how Pluto is Not a planet, and dwarf planets are just as cool as planets, and we do not decide what to call things based on nostalgia because that is not how science works gosh darn it!

Some nights, they would just lay there and speculate about the prospect of extraterrestrial life. Cyrus was sure they weren’t alone in the universe. TJ was less sure, but he was starting to come around.

Sometimes, after TJ finished a story, Cyrus would tell him facts about the stars in the constellation TJ had been talking about.

Tonight was one of these nights. They were laying on a blanket, wearing each other’s hoodies and wrapped in each other’s arms. Cyrus didn’t even bother lifting his arm to point at the constellations. “Tell me the story of Perseus and Andromeda.”

TJ rolled his eyes. “You’ve heard that story a million times.”

“It’s my favorite.”

So TJ told the story. Cyrus probably knew it by heart by then. It was very romantic, the way TJ told it: the story of a love written in the stars.

When he was done, Cyrus pointed to one of the stars in the constellation Perseus. “That star is Algol, the demon star; it’s supposed to represent Medusa’s head. It’s actually three stars. And two of the stars eclipse each other as they orbit each other, passing in front of each other relative to us, which makes its brightness vary regularly. But the coolest part is that the mass from one of the stars is being transferred to one of the other ones, like it’s eating it. And this affects the life cycles of the stars because more massive stars are supposed to age faster, but in the Algol system, the less massive star is farther along in its stellar evolution because it used to be more massive before some of its mass spilled over onto the other star.”

TJ just stared at him with a goofy smile. “I love you.”

Cyrus looked back at TJ with a matching smile. “I love you too.” He curled up even closer to TJ.

“Do you have anymore fun space facts?”

“Did you know that the Andromeda galaxy is going to collide with our galaxy?”

TJ raised his eyebrow. “Oh? What’s gonna happen to the Earth when that happen?”

“Nothing. The stars in galaxies are so far apart, that there most likely won’t be any collisions between the stars in the two galaxies. Besides, Earth will probably be long gone by then anyway.”

“Huh. So, what is going to happen to the Earth?”

“Well, in a few billion years, the sun will expand and consume the inner planets. I think.”

“Oh. Do you have any less depressing space facts?”

Cyrus thought for a moment. “The process of what happens to something when it falls into a black hole is called spaghettification.”

TJ laughed. “Really?”

Cyrus nodded. “Yep. Astronomers are great at naming things.”

“I love it. Anything else?”

Cyrus thought again for a second. “Ok, so one of my favorite concepts in astronomy is the concept of lookback time.”

“What’s that?”

“Ok, so you know how light travels at about three hundred thousand kilometers per second?”

“Um… sure.”

“Right. So that’s obviously the fastest anything can travel, but it’s not instantaneous, and well, the universe is really big. So, the light from stuff that’s really far away takes a long time to reach us. So, by the time it reaches us, we’re seeing those objects the way they looked a long time ago. We’re literally looking back in time. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, so we literally can’t see anything further than 13.8 billion lightyears away because the light from those objects hasn’t had time to reach us yet. And when we look at things at the edge of the observable universe, we’re looking at the very beginning of the universe. And if someone 65 million years away was looking at us, they’d be able to see dinosaurs.”

TJ smiled at him. “It always comes back to dinosaurs with you, doesn’t it?”

Cyrus nudged him with his elbow. “Shut up.”

TJ laughed. “No, but seriously, that’s really cool. You’re so smart.”

“So are you. You know the stories behind like every constellation. That’s so cool.”

“Well, not every one. I made some of them up.”

“Well, I still say you’re smart if you can make up stories like that.”

TJ smiled. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah?”

“How come you like that story about Perseus and Andromeda so much?”

Cyrus blushed. “‘Cause that’s the one you told me right before you told me you love me for the first time.”

“That’s adorable.”

Cyrus buried his face in TJ’s chest. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious.” He kissed the top of Cyrus’s head. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”


End file.
